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Saturday, January 4, 2014

The New York Times raises serious issues about poverty and draws idiotic conclusions

A second-generation drug addict and welfare mom, with six kids from three different fathers and a long history of criminal activity, is bringing up her children in poverty.So rather than attribute it to the obvious abrogation of personal responsibility by the parents, The New York Times blames "income inequity." via City Journal:

Dasani Coates, the 11-year-old homeless child profiled in Andrea Elliott’s highly praised five-part New York Times feature, arrived on stage at Wednesday’s inauguration ceremonies to serve as a poignant symbol of—in Mayor de Blasio’s words—“the economic and social inequalities that threaten to unravel the city we love.” But far from providing a window into inequality, the Times series, “Invisible Child,” is better understood as a beautifully reported but muddled revival of decades-long evasions about underclass poverty.

Dasani’s story is moving but hardly new. Anyone who lived in New York—or D.C., Detroit, or Chicago, for that matter—in the 1980s and early 1990s or who has dipped into books like Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family knows the general outline. Chanel, Dasani’s mother and herself the daughter of a welfare-dependent drug addict in Brooklyn, has six children by three different men, a long history of debilitating drug use, an explosive temper, and numerous arrests. Her husband, Supreme, has brought his own drug addiction and two more children by a deceased wife into the mix; Elliott makes vague reference to previous children as well. At some point, Supreme worked as a barber, but as far as we can tell, Chanel has never held a job. In truth, she isn’t much of a mother, either. She is often “listless from methadone”; the family’s room is filled with “piles of unwashed clothes.”